The present invention relates to methods of scheduling chemical production equipment in a factory or the like and in particular to an improved computerized method for scheduling equipment related to such chemical production.
The manufacturing of chemicals and materials may provide a system receiving raw materials and processing the materials in multiple batches or tasks, each associated with a process or equipment, to produce a final product. Ideally, each of the tasks may be scheduled to maximize the efficient utilization of the equipment and to minimize the total processing time of the material.
Such scheduling problems are often formulated as mixed integer programming models that may be run on electronic computers. Mixed integer programming (MIP) is a class of linear programming problems widely used in industry to find solutions to optimization problems. In a mixed integer programming problem, some of the unknown variables are integers and some are non-integers.
Such programming problems are generally NP-hard, practically demanding extensive computer processing time that ultimately may be a barrier to a solution or to finding a solution fast enough for practical application to a factory environment.